Tuesday, May 31, 2011

The painter and etcher Frederick Warren Freer was born in 1849 in Kennicott's Grove, Illinois, now part of Chicago. He studied art in Chicago before attending the Munich Academy under Wagner and Diez. Well-respected in his own day, Freer seems to be largely forgotten now, but I rank him among the most interesting of the New York Etching Club artists.

Frederick W. Freer, At Polling

Etching, 1888

My only print by Frederick W. Freer is an evocative and tranquil scene in Polling, Bavaria, where Freer joined Frank Duveneck and his students in the summer of 1879. It is executed largely in drypoint, with great subtlety of tone. So far as I can tell Freer's preferred subjects in his paintings were intimate interiors with a mother and child, using his own wife and children as models, but he also painted landscapes. Freer returned to the USA in 1880, living in New York until 1890 when he returned to Chicago to become President of the Chicago Academy of Design. He died in Chicago in 1908.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

The painter, printmaker, and photographer Ferdinand Schmutzer is little-known today, yet his work, which focuses on moments of quiet thought and reflection, has a rare intimacy.

Ferdinand Schmutzer, Tagesneuigkeiten (The Day's News)

Etching, 1908

Even when he depicts a crowd scene, as in his etching of poor citizens of Vienna crowding in a soup line outside a monastery or convent, there is no sense of jostling or hubbub; instead one senses the silent resignation of people too tired to make much noise. This etching, the smaller of two versions of the same scene, is my favourite among the five etchings I possess by Ferdinand Schmutzer. It shows him able to tackle a really complex composition with great finesse, and it also beautifully demonstrates Schmutzer's mastery of light effects. I can't put it better than Clive, who writes in his Art and the Aesthete post on Schmutzer, "He has unusual skill in balancing the plain darks and lights with delicately fretted greys."

Schmutzer came from an artistic family. He was the son of the animal sculptor Ferdinand Schmutzer, and grandson of the sculptor Vincent Schmutzer. His great-grandfather Jacob Mathäus Schmutzer founded the Imperial Academy of Engraving, which mutated into the current Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, where Ferdinand Schmutzer studied sculpture under Kuhne and etching under William Unger (winning the Prix National in 1894).

Ferdinand Schmutzer, Entdecktes Geheimniss (The Secret Discovered)

Etching, 1897

Ferdinand Schmutzer was himself appointed as a Professor at the Vienna Academy in 1908. He was a member of the Vienna Secession from 1901, and President 1914-1917. He was born, lived, and died in Vienna. He was an important figure in the artistic and cultural life of the city before and after the Great War, and was associated with Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Richard Strauss, and Arthur Schnitzler.

Ferdinand Schmutzer, Antwerpen (Antwerp)

Etching, 1915

Besides genre scenes such as my first three etchings, Ferdinand Schmutzer also produced elegant landscapes and cityscapes, in a style that shows the influence of German Impressionists such as Leopold von Kalckreuth and Paul Baum.

Ferdinand Schmutzer produced around 300 etchings, which have been catalogued by Arpad Weixlgärtner in Das radierte Werk von Ferdinand Schmutzer, 1922. He also left more than 3000 glass plate photographs, an important part of his artistic legacy that has only recently been uncovered. Like his etchings, Schmutzer's photographs are highly sensitive to the play of light and shade

Friday, May 13, 2011

Felix Meseck was born in Danzig in 1883, and died in Holzminden in 1955. Meseck studied at the Fine Art Academies in Berlin and Königsberg, studying painting under Ludwig Dettmann and printmaking with Heinrich Wolff. In 1926 he was appointed professor at the Weimar Academy, a post from which he was forced out by the Nazis. Before WWI, in which he served at the front as an ordinary soldier, Meseck concentrated on painting; after the war he turned to printmaking, becoming especially known for his etchings and drypoints. Meseck was a member of the Berlin Secession, and contributed to leading journals such as Ganymed, as well as illustrating works by Shakespeare, Goethe, Novalis, and Brentano. Much of Felix Meseck's work was destroyed in the Red Army attack on Danzig in 1945.

Felix Meseck, Landschaft

Etching, 1920s

Felix Meseck's art is a curious blend of Expressionism, Romanticism and Symbolism, with a forlorn, desolate quality at its heart. His spiky, unsettling line is the opposite of everything fluid, supple, and sensuous. Instead there is a sense of jarred nerves and watchful unease. The overriding impression is one of neurasthenia, and I would not be at all surprised to discover that Meseck suffered from shell-shock (post-traumatic stress) after his experiences in WWI. His art has that hyper-aware inability to relax. The trees that are a recurring motif in his art certainly bring to mind the ravaged landscapes of WWI. Whether depicting landscapes or symbolic groups of people, there is something in Felix Meseck's work that speaks of unreachable loss. The people in his etchings for Hymnen an die Nacht seem disorientated and desperate, like the displaced and bereaved of war. This work was published very soon after the end of WWI, in 1919, and would certainly have carried that emotional charge for Meseck's contemporaries. It was printed at Gurlitt-Presse and published by Fritz Gurlitt in an edition of 125 copies, of which 50 were printed on heavyweight handmade wove paper, with all ten etchings hand-signed by the artist.

Felix Meseck, Hymnen an die Nacht I

Etching, 1919

Felix Meseck, Hymnen an die Nacht II

Etching, 1919

Felix Meseck, Hymnen an die Nacht IV

Etching, 1919

Felix Meseck, Hymnen an die Nacht V

Etching, 1919

Felix Meseck, Hymnen an die Nacht VI

Etching, 1919

Felix Meseck, Hymnen an die Nacht VII

Etching, 1919

Felix Meseck, Hymnen an die Nacht IX

Etching, 1919

There was a retrospective exhibition of the art of Felix Meseck at the Museum Höxter Corvey in 1987.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

When I wrote my post A walk along High Street, I was aware that three of Eric Ravilious's evocative lithographs of shop fronts for High Street had first been published in the journal Signature: A Quadrimestrial of Typography and Graphic Arts, with an appreciation by John Piper. This short article, entitled "Lithographs by Eric Ravilious of Shop Fronts", was published in March 1937, while the book did not appear until the following year. What I had not realised was that the three plates in Signature varied significantly from those in the book. When I first noticed this, I thought it was merely a matter of variant colourways, but the more I look at these beautiful prints the more variations I see. I won't spoil the fun of this spot-the-difference game by pointing out every detail, but will simply put the two versions next to each other. All were printed by the Curwen Press, where the lithographs were executed directly onto the lithographic stones.

Eric Ravilious, Restaurant and Grill Room

Lithograph, 1937

Signature version

Eric Ravilious, Restaurant and Grill Room

Lithograph, 1938

High Street version

Eric Ravilious, Letter Makers

Lithograph, 1937

Signature version

Eric Ravilious, Letter Makers

Lithograph, 1938

High Street version

Eric Ravilious, Naturalist: Furrier: Plumassier

Lithograph, 1937

Signature version

Eric Ravilious, Naturalist: Furrier: Plumassier

Lithograph, 1938

High Street version

Here is the text of John Piper's short essay, as published in Signature:

"There is an accent on line in all the work of Eric Ravilious. His control over a pencil, a pen or an engraving tool - the sense that it is never leading him, but that he is always taking it exactly where he wants it - made it necessary that sooner or later he should try lithography as a medium. Ravilious is a particularly English artist. That may seem a stale thing to say, but he is English in this most important way; in this matter of control over line - line that can express fluently movement or stillness, and grace as well as volume. The delight of his new lithographs of shop fronts is of a kind that is rare enough. It is the delight one gets from work which one feels has been specially suited to an artist's taste and feeling; and there is probably no one else who could have made these records at once so faithfully and so imaginatively. There is about them the suggestion that you are looking in at a series of gay, old-fashioned parties from a matter-of-fact street in the present. They are records of a passing beauty, but they are full of present-day experience. And they are faithful enough to look like tuck-shops full of sherbet, liquorice and lollipops - which after all is one of the chief appeals of the attractive shop. The three examples reproduced here are from a series of twenty-four."

Sunday, May 1, 2011

"Say something, Edith." This catchphrase in my wife's family, spoken whenever anyone is feeling too tired or bored to amuse themselves, took my fancy long before I knew anything about the man who coined it, Claude Flight, or the wonderful group of linocut artists he inspired, the Grosvenor School. The Grosvenor School artists include Cyril Power, Sybil Andrews, Eileen Mayo, Lill Tschudi, Ethel Spowers, Dorrit Black, and Eveline Symes, as well as Claude Flight himself, and his life-partner Edith Lawrence. Flight founded the Grosvenor School of Modern Art with Iain MacNab, Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews, and taught there from 1926-1930. After that, he taught informally at summer schools in his neolithic chalk cave at Chantemesle on the banks of the Seine, which he had bought while serving in France in WWI. The Grosvenor School of Modern Art was located in London, at 33, Warwick Square.

William Kermode, At 33, Warwick Square

Woodcut, 1930

Born in 1881, Walter Claude Flight was the most influential figure in the development of the colour linocut as a key element of the Modernist aesthetic. Influenced by the Futurists, Flight embraced the linocut as a truly democratic art form, and one that was capable of expressing the power, energy, and expressive movement of the Machine Age. Flight was a cousin of the writer Rudyard Kipling. He had tried various careers - including engineering and beekeeping - before he entered Heatherley's School of Fine Art in 1913. Although his time at Heatherley's was cut short by the outbreak of WWI, the relationships he forged there were crucial to the development of Flight's art. One notable fellow-student was C. R. W. Nevinson, who introducted Flight to the work of the Futurists. Flight married a fellow-student, Clare James, in 1915. This marriage produced two daughters, but did not last. From 1922 until his death, his companion was a fellow linocut artist, and textile designer, Edith Lawrence (1890-1973). Flight and Lawrence shared an exhbiition of textiles and linocuts at the Redfern Gallery in 1928. All of my linocuts by Claude Flight come from the book Christmas and other Feasts and Festivals: A Picture Commentary for Grown-Ups, published by George Routledge in 1936. The book is credited to Claude Flight (who is the author of the brief introduction), but the 45 two-colour linocuts that follow are "Printed from Linoleum Blocks cut by Claude Flight and Edith Lawrence". The printer was Headley Brothers; the cuts are printed on both sides of the paper, back-to-back.

Claude Flight & Edith Lawrence, The First Feast

Linocut, 1936

Claude Flight & Edith Lawrence, Trooping the Colour

Linocut, 1936

Claude Flight & Edith Lawrence, Nursery Tea

Linocut, 1936

Claude Flight & Edith Lawrence, English Picnic

Linocut, 1936

Claude Flight & Edith Lawrence, French Picnic

Linocut, 1936

There is no way of knowing which hand cut which line, and the linocuts must be credited as joint productions of Flight and Lawrence; this method of joint creation was also employed by two other notable linocut artists of the Grosvenor School, Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power, working as Andrew-Power. I love the sly, quirky humour of these vibrant linocuts, which show both Claude Flight's sureness of line, and the ready wit with which Edith Lawrence was able to respond in a moment to the challenge, "Say something, Edith."

Claude Flight & Edith Lawrence, Knocken Moddens

Linocut, 1936

Claude Flight & Edith Lawrence, The Christening

Linocut, 1936

Claude Flight & Edith Lawrence, Bump Supper

Linocut, 1936

Claude Flight & Edith Lawrence, Winkle Barrow

Linocut, 1936

Claude Flight & Edith Lawrence, Cocktail Party

Linocut, 1936

Claude Flight is now seen as a pioneering Modernist, and it is ironic to note that he was expelled from the Seven and Five Society because of Ben Nicholson's rigorous doctrinaire insistence on abstraction as the only way forward for art.

Claude Flight & Edith Lawrence, A School Treat

Linocut, 1936

Claude Flight & Edith Lawrence, Maypole Dance

Linocut, 1936

Claude Flight & Edith Lawrence, Café Chantant

Linocut, 1936

Claude Flight & Edith Lawrence, Summer Holidays

Linocut, 1936

Claude Flight & Edith Lawrence, Chelsea Arts Ball

Linocut, 1936

Claude Flight and Edith Lawrence moved from their London home and studio at 5, Rodmarton Mews, off Baker Street, to a cottage in Wiltshire to escape the Blitz in WWII. While they survived, their London studio and their linoleum blocks did not, being destroyed by bombing in 1941. After suffering a stroke in 1947, Claude Flight had to stop creating art. He died in 1955.

Emma Bradford, Window at Wood Cottage

Etching, c.1979

Their Wiltshire home was Wood Cottage, Pigtrough Lane, Donhead St Andrew. I can give you a glimpse of it as it was in 1979, in an etching by my wife, Emma Bradford. There is also a very evocative description of what I take to be Wood Cottage (or if, not, one uncannily like it) in Jane Gardam's novel The Man in the Wooden Hat.